The person who bound the last sheaf must carry the Old Man
home, while the rest laugh and jeer at him. The puppet is hung up in
the farmhouse and remains till a new Old Man is made at the next
harvest.
In some of these customs, as Mannhardt has remarked, the person who
is called by the same name as the last sheaf and sits beside it on
the last waggon is obviously identified with it; he or she
represents the corn-spirit which has been caught in the last sheaf;
in other words, the corn-spirit is represented in duplicate, by a
human being and by a sheaf. The identification of the person with
the sheaf is made still clearer by the custom of wrapping up in the
last sheaf the person who cuts or binds it. Thus at Hermsdorf in
Silesia it used to be the regular practice to tie up in the last
sheaf the woman who had bound it. At Weiden, in Bavaria, it is the
cutter, not the binder, of the last sheaf who is tied up in it. Here
the person wrapt up in the corn represents the corn-spirit, exactly
as a person wrapt in branches or leaves represents the tree-spirit.
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